Edward Leigh: I apologise; it was not a first for my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk.
	I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell), who is a new Member of our House. He is not a member of the Committee. There is a grave danger that these debates become a Committee love-in and we all just slap each other on the back. We welcome him coming in from outside, with his private sector experience. He spoke with great knowledge about the value of shared services, which is not a sexy subject. I am not sure that his predecessor as the hon. Member for Henley would have been very interested, but it is an important subject and huge savings can be made.
	As usual, we much enjoyed the speech of the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell), as we greatly enjoy him as a member of the Committee. He lightens the atmosphere so often with his biting tongue. He took us to task for not having the bite of congressional committees and seemed to suggest that we could get more publicity for our hearings and our reports. That is an extremely difficult tightrope to tread. We cannot be partisan. We cannot, and I never do, attack Ministers. We must be consensual and take the whole Committee with us, but despite all that our reports are hard-hitting and we get to the heart of matters. It is a difficult balance to achieve.
	I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Angela Browning) for her comments and what she said about the importance of management information. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Justine Greening) who, as an accountant, comes with a particular financial expertise. We are grateful for her remarks. She, too, referred to the problem that has been a theme of the debate: civil servants and whether they should say no. I think civil servants need to seek directions more. There is a procedure for that, and this is where the Public Accounts Committee is intimately involved. If a permanent secretary thinks a Minister is asking for something that is not financially viable, he can seek a direction. If he seeks a direction, it will come to our Committee. Permanent secretaries should be more willing to use that ultimate weapon. Civil servants must say "No, Minister" more often.
	Lastly, I thank the Minister. It is such a joy; one sits through so many debates in which Ministers do not refer in any great detail to what has been said, but she took half an hour to refer to virtually every point that had been made. In particular, she was careful to reply to some of the points that I had made earlier. By the way, I do not think that it does any harm to share one's notes with the Minister before the debate, as I do—jaw, jaw is better than war, war after all. If a Minister is warned about what a spokesman is going to say, they will be more able to reply to the points, and this Minister does that extremely well.
	I did not deal with the new governance in any great detail; we sorted that out through the Public Accounts Commission, and the National Audit Office now has a robust new governance. I now have a difficult job. Under the statute, the Prime Minister and the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee have to appoint the Comptroller and Auditor General. That is a wide procedure; by definition, the Prime Minister is a member of the Government and by definition the Chairman of the PAC is a member of the Opposition.
	We are now starting the process and trying to carry it out in a completely modern and open way. The old days, when such things were done in private and some senior civil servant was just tapped on the shoulder, are not with us any more. A very well regarded firm of head-hunters has been approached and advertisements have been placed in the newspapers. Anybody from the private or public sectors can apply. There will be a very small appointments committee; obviously, I will sit on it. The Prime Minister, who has other things on his mind, will be represented by the permanent secretary to the Treasury. We will be advised by Tim Burr, who has intimated to me that he does not wish to apply for the permanent role of Comptroller and Auditor General.
	I have said all that because the appointment will almost certainly be made before our next debate. I assure the House that I consider my new duty to be one of the most important that I have had to undertake during my time at the House of Commons. The man or woman who is the new Comptroller and Auditor General will have one term only, for a maximum of 10 years; after that, they will not be able to return to the public sector or any part of the private sector with which they have dealt. They will be unsackable for 10 years and nobody will be able to influence them. There is no more important job than that of the Comptroller and Auditor General in ensuring financial and general accountability. I hope that we get it right and I ask for hon. Members' support as we try to do so. We will do our best.
	Finally, I thank the Minister for what she said about the financial alignment project, which sounds boring but is unbelievably important. As every  Hansard report shows, there is no doubt that we have one of the best audit systems in the world; however, we also have one of the weakest Budget systems in the world. We have a strong National Audit Office. Some of us have studied supreme audit offices around the world, and I am not sure how we could do things much better in respect of considering what has gone wrong in the past. As the hon. Member for Great Grimsby said, one of the problems with our work is that we often look at things too much in the past.
	I have tried to speed the whole process up to ensure that the National Audit Office works quicker, reports come to us quicker and we report quicker. The system works pretty well, but we have a very weak Budget system. One reason for that is that it is virtually impossible for Members of Parliament to understand the process. It is all much easier and better done in the United States Congress, where the President proposes a Budget through the Office of Budget and Management. It goes to Congress, and what emerges at the other end bears no relation to what the President has proposed. The President proposes; Congress disposes.
	We will never get to that situation in this House, because the Government are drawn from the legislature; we will never go down the congressional route and perhaps we never want to. However, we have to get a much more transparent system of considering the Budget. Through a sub-committee of the Liaison Committee, I have been working with the Chairman of the Treasury Committee, and we have been working with the Government, who should take a lot of credit for getting the whole process moving. That was their initiative and they should be congratulated on trying to bring more transparency to the whole Budget process.
	As usual, we have had a good debate. We will carry on trying to do our job, and I commend the motion to the House.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	That this House takes note of the 5th, the 8th, the 14th to the 29th, the 31st to the 35th, the 37th, the 38th, the 42nd and the 50th Reports and the 1st and 2(nd) Special Reports of the Committee of Public Accounts of Session 2007-08, and of the Treasury Minutes on these Reports (Cm 7366 and 7453).